Tuesday, December 16, 2003

Word Popularity Colorizer

Using the data I aquired by querying Google for the page count for about 28,000 words, I wrote a Word Popularity Colorizer. Words with high usage – those that appear at least once on a lot of pages indexed by Google – are given a darker background-color than rare words.

Four Samples

Yahoo Directory		This is from a Yahoo! directory listing countries. The bottom is darker than the top. One can see that only at the bottom there is something resembling normal English sentences.
Authorama Book Chapter		An Authorama page has a lot of black scattered all around, because the page mainly consists of “natural” written language.
Heise Homepage		A German news page. Darker areas are scarce because the page contains German language only (with some English tech words in-between).
Einstein		This is from an English version of Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity at Project Gutenberg.

Here you can enter your own URL to try the tool:

Word Popularity Colorizer by Philipp Lenssen

Google Referral Counter Update

The Google Referral Counter ASP script has been updated to version 1.01. It will now also list top URLs, so that you can check which pages are most popular in Google searches. Note that the script expects a certain log-file format; see the sample for details.

Google Referral Counter U ... by Philipp Lenssen

Keys to the Kingdom of Knowledge

“But for a minute forget about the big numbers, the millions of customers and the billions of dollars. Think about what’s at stake culturally and socially in the search wars, and all those zeros start looking pretty paltry by comparison. The Internet is swiftly becoming the primary repository of the bulk of human information. Search is the way we get at that information, and companies like Google wield enormous power. They reflect our common interests and shape how we learn about the world with their rapid-fire search results. This isn’t just about dotcom juggernauts duking it out for stock options and bragging rights. Whoever wins the search wars owns the keys to the kingdom of knowledge.”
– Lev Grossman, Search And Destroy (Time), Dec. 15, 2003

Keys to the Kingdom of Kn ... by Philipp Lenssen

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